The invention relates generally to packet communications and, more particularly, to header compression in real-time packet communications.
The term header compression (HC) refers to the art of minimizing the necessary bandwidth for information carried in packet headers on a per hop basis over point-to-point links. Header compression is usually realized by sending static information only initially. Semi-static information is then transferred by sending only the change (delta) from the previous header, and completely random information is sent without compression. Hence, header compression is usually realized with a state machine.
Conventional header compression algorithms are designed basically for narrow band wired channels with a rather small complexity at the receiving decompression side. Also, the complexity at the sending compressing side is kept low to allow efficient implementations in routers where as much computing capacity as possible is needed for the routing. Further, the wired channels for which existing header compression algorithms are designed typically have very small probabilities for bit errors (e.g., a bit error rate of 10xe2x88x926). Wireless channels (generally characterized by lossy, narrow bandwidth links) typically have a much higher probability for error, so header compression for use in wireless channels should be designed with a much larger bit error probability in mind (e.g., bit error rates up to 10xe2x88x923).
Conventional compression schemes for RTP/UDP/IP headers are often based on soft-state machines with states called contexts. The de-compressor context is often updated by each packet received, and if a packet is lost on the link, the context will become invalid. When the decompressor context is invalidated, all successive packets have to be discarded until the soft-state is updated by a full (uncompressed) header. A request for update is sent from the receiving end when the decompressor realizes that the first packet is discarded (or lost), and then it takes a full round-trip (from receiving end to transmitting end and back) before the update (packet with uncompressed header) arrives. This often results in many lost packets. The loss of context state may also occur if the receiving de-compressor fails to successfully de-compress a compressed header.
If the payload for the packets with the compressed headers carries a real time service, the loss of several successive packets may be disastrous for the quality of that real time service. For example, the quality of real time speech service will degrade substantially with increased packet loss rate due to successive lost speech frames. If the speech frame errors have a bursty characteristic, the speech quality will be worse than for the same speech frame error rate but with a less correlated frame error characteristic.
One way of reducing the probability for invalid context states, and thereby packet loss, is to increase the intelligence at the receiver, for example by increasing the probability for the de-compressor to successfully estimate (guess) what the correct context state should be, without using more bits per compressed header. In the example of real time speech service, the conventional RTP time stamp field value typically increments in a predictable fashion (and thus can be reliably predicted or guessed) during periods of speech, but after silent or non-speech periods the time stamp has a more randomized value from the receiver""s point of view.
The existing standard for compression of RTP/UDP/IP headers (see, e.g., Steven Casner and Van Jacobson, Compressing IP/UDP/RTP Headers for Low-Speech Serial Links, IETF RFC 2508, IETF Network Working Group, February 1999, incorporated herein by reference) is referred to herein as CRTP. In CRTP the time stamp delta value is coded with a varying number of bits depending on the value. A large time stamp change since the last packet causes a large delta value, which disadvantageously requires more bits in the compressed header to carry the delta value indicative of the time stamp information.
Whenever DTX (discontinuous transmission) or silent suppression is used in a real time speech service, the time stamp field of the RTP header will have a stochastic behavior difficult to predict in a stream of RTP/UDP/IP packets carrying speech. Hence, the time stamp field is one of the most difficult fields to de-compress at the receiver by means of guessing. In CRTP, the time stamp delta value is coded with a number of bits that,depends on the size of the time stamp change since the last packet. Thus, long silent or non-speech periods, require more bits to delta-modulate the time stamp field, so the first header after a silent period will typically be larger than in speech packets corresponding to a speech period.
It is therefore desirable to provide a technique for time stamp compression/decompression without the aforementioned disadvantages associated with conventional schemes.
The present invention advantageously provides techniques for efficiently compressing and reconstructing the time stamp value of a real time communications packet whose time stamp value does not fall within a normally expected sequence of time stamp values. A first part of the time stamp value is selected by the header compressor and transmitted. A second part of the time stamp value is estimated by the header decompressor based on elapsed time between receipt of consecutive packets. The header decompressor combines the second part with the first part received from the header compressor to produce a reconstructed time stamp value.